In 2008 Americans elected
Barack Obama to the presidency as an antiwar progressive change maker despite
having virtually no knowledge of his life prior to 2004. In the 18 months since
the election, our new president seems to have undergone a 180 reversal in his
politics. As well as reneging on nearly all his campaign promises, he has
continued and expanded the pro-war, pro-torture, pro-covert assassination and
anti-civil liberties policies of his predecessor George W. Bush. Eighteen
months into Bush's presidency, the major corporate players who influenced Bush
and Cheney were blatantly obvious. Bush had extensive prior (family) ties with
the oil industry and Cheney with both oil companies and defense contractors. While
Obama also seems to be at the beck and call of corporate backers, exactly who
they are is much less clear. The question has led many analysts on both sides
of the political aisle - to take a closer look at his background before he came
on the national stage as a US senator from Illinois senator in 2004.

Obama's secrecy and
evasiveness about his early life hasn't helped. In fact there are gaping holes
in his resume that have led to all kinds of (mainly right wing) conspiracy
theories about the authenticity of his birth certificate, his secret adherence
to the Muslim religion, a possible stint with the CIA during the years nobody
remembers him at Columbia, and his allegiance to a secret international
Marxist/socialist conspiracy. I think the birth certificate issue is a red
herring to distract people from growing evidence that Obama has a past in
intelligence. Likewise a so-called Marxist/socialist conspiracy would require financing
- and wealthy elites are very reluctant to fund Marxist-Leninist groups that
seek to deprive them of their wealth.

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According to Obama's unofficial
biographer Webster Tarpley and Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency
employee and member of the Association for Intelligence Officers, more and more credible evidence
is surfacing that Obama had some type of intelligence career before
entering public life. The Russians certainly thought he did when they detained
Senators Obama and Lugar in 2004 following a three day fact finding mission
related to disarmament talks. In fact they accused Obama of spying for the
British (?) and demanded to search his aircraft (as he was leaving, not
entering, the country).

It's also a matter of public record
that Business International Corporation, Inc.(BIC), which employed Obama
for one year after he graduated from Columbiain 1983 was a front company
for the CIA (see New York Times 12/27/77). BIC used journalists as non-official
cover (NOC) agents around in a number of foreign countries. A NOC (Valerie
Plame is the best example) is an intelligence operative who assumes a covert
role in an organization with no official ties to the government they are acting
for. Obama's job was to do research and to write for two BIC publications, Financing
Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly
newsletter.

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Other evidence of Obama's
intelligence links is either indirect or from off-the-record intelligence
sources. However as far back as 1981, when Obama was 20 and made his first trip
to Pakistan, he seems to wind up in interesting places with interesting people
for reasons that don't quite add up to me. For example, he supposedly
traveled from OccidentalCollege in California to stay with Muhammadmian Soomo
(who would become acting president of Pakistan in 2008) in Karachi to go partridge hunting. Though
Obama also used the opportunity to visit his mother, Ann Dunham, in Lahore. Ann Dunham, who worked for the
Ford Foundation and USAID (another notorious CIA front operation) in Indonesia, moved to Lahore in 1981 to work as a "consultant"
for the Asian Development Bank. As Madsen points out in the Wayne Madsen
Report, this was at a time when the CIA was increasing its presence in Pakistan to build the Afghan mujaheddin to
fight the Soviet invasion.

Who Obama Worked for in Chicago

In 1984 Obama left New York to move to Chicago, where he became a civil rights
lawyer and involved himself in a number of "progressive" foundations like the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Gamaliel and Wood foundations. However
Tarpley, Barry Zwicker, Bob Feldman, Lila Rajiva, Michael Barker and others
have raised serious questions about the progressive credentials of these and
similar "liberal" foundations. They point to increasing evidence that the Ford
Foundation (of which Gamaliel is a subsidiary), the Rockefeller, Wood,
MacArthur and similar foundations actually play a "gatekeeper" or
"counterinsurgency" function to suppress genuine grassroots organizing.

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Attorney General Robert
Kennedy was one of the first to raise the alarm and launched an investigation
in 1967 about the CIA's use of these and other foundations as "conduits,"
"pass-throughs," and "fronts" to disguise CIA funding for domestic operations
(it is technically illegal for the CIA to operate on US soil under federal
law). The late journalist and judicial reformer, Sherman Skolnick, used to investigate
foundation tax returns and traced a lot of "liberal" foundation funding to
private right wing elites.

I am a 63 year old American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. I have just published a young adult novel THE BATTLE FOR TOMORROW (which won a NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award) about a 16 year old girl who (more...)